Slowly, slowly, the media and the politicians are shaking off the cobwebs that built up throughout August and are starting to make some news. Obviously, the big news is that Andy Card John Bolten has rolled out the new Republican Warmongering Midterm Election Product. You simply do not do things like that before Labor Day, and definitely not in August. And having settled on a product that it weightier and graver than the threat of Stalinism, National Socialism, or that sorry mother fucking ass, Saddam, they now look a little bit ridiculous to a media (ABC and FOX excepted) that is not used to lies as big as this. They're not really on board. They took many swipes at Rumsfeld for calling the majority of Americans no better or wiser than Nazi appeasers. What were they to do when Bush took that same rhetoric and doubled down?

When Bush finally admitted what Dana Priest had reported (that we have been holding prisoners in Soviet era gulags in Eastern Europe and elsewhere) and torturing them (without torturing them), the CIA breathed a sigh of relief. Hey, they thought, maybe we won't be spending our latter years in the Hague after all. Here's a tip to members of our intelligence community that are faced with such concerns: "resign". It's still a free country.

If you don't resign you may have your decision made for you, much like Lincoln Chafee. Chafee is so endangered in his upcoming primary that the GOP appears to have postponed the vote on confirming John Bolton until after it is over. Meanwhile, the craziest congresscritter of all, Curt Weldon (PA-07), is so afraid of defeat that he wanted to introduce a bill stripping the President of his commander-in-chief responsibilities and handing them to the Pentagon. Meanwhile, tube analyst, Senator Ted Stevens used a procedural move to save the GOP Senators from having to give Rumsfeld a vote of confidence. That's how great things are going in Iraq and among the American public. Here's another tip:

We took an interesting phone call today from an official at the Baghdad morgue. We get these calls every day - a daily tally of the violence. But this one was particularly sobering.

It turns out the official toll of violent deaths in August was just revised upwards to 1535 from 550, tripling the total. Now, we're depressingly used to hearing about deaths here, so much so that the numbers can be numbing. But this means that a much-publicized drop-off in violence in August - heralded by both the Iraqi government and the US military as a sign that a new security effort in Baghdad was working -- apparently didn't exist.

Other roadblocks have shown up in the clean implementation of the Republican Warmongering Midterm Election Product. For example, it looks like a bipartisan group of Senators is urging Specter to hold hearings rather than introducing his bill to end democracy as we know it in our time by legalizing warrantless wiretapping.

And this time next year, we won't have Tony Blair to kick around anymore. He went and screwed the poodle.

It's elections season. Bring it on.